Hotels have been largely empty during the pandemic. As have airports. So if you own an airport hotel, chances are it’s been a rough 20 months.
No wonder, then, that the owner of the former Courtyard by Marriott LaGuardia hotel in Queens wants to sell the property.
The Connecticut-based Heyman family has owned the six-story building on the 3.5-acre lot at 90-10 Ditmars Boulevard in East Elmhurst for the past decades.
GCP Realty II, the Heyman-family-owned entity, closed the 288-key hotel in 2017. The building has sat vacant since then, according to Stephen Preuss of Ripco Real Estate, who is marketing the property along with Kevin Schmitz, Kevin Louie and Andreas Eftymiou.
Even though the hotel has been shut, the owner has kept up daily maintenance, Preuss said.
“If you’re walking in, it really looks very similar to an operating hotel,” he said.
The obvious difference: no guests.
The owner now wants to take advantage of the strong market in Queens and find a “buyer who has the right type of use for it,” including as a senior care, assisted living, office, medical or mixed-use facility, or even another hotel, Preuss said. Ripco is expecting offers in the mid-$60 million range.
The 189,250-square-foot building is located directly across from LaGuardia Airport, which is going through an $8 billion redevelopment project. The property, which includes 323 parking spots, is near the entrance to the Grand Central Parkway.
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The property stands less than a mile from New York LaGuardia Airport Marriott at 102-05 Ditmars Boulevard. In January, the 443-key hotel was sold for $86.6 million, and the adjacent 1.5-acre development site — which could hold a 750,000-square-foot project — was sold for $17 million, according to property records.
The buyer of both the hotel and the development site was California-based private equity firm ASAP Holdings. The company’s CEO Frank Yuan told The Real Deal that he plans to build housing and a community center on the development site.
The Heyman property made news in June when the owner won a years-long tax certiorari against the city, reducing the property’s assessed value by 85 percent from the fiscal years 2014-2015 through 2018-2019. The average assessed value in those four years was $24.2 million but was reduced to $3.6 million as a result of the lawsuit.